Schlomo Schapiro

I am at the CloudCamp Ghent  and can share some notes. VMware Cloud Foundry http://www.flickr.com/photos/70260750@N08/6376439699/ Lode Vermeiren , VMware. Talk on Slideshare Long part about VMware products and history that are cloud related. It got actually interesting once he started to demo stuff. The good part was that it was very authentic (e.g. not all parts where working). The bad part was that there was not so much to see, just some basic "upload my simple Hello World app" The speaker distributed USB Keys with a VM and registration codes for the Cloud Foundry service. Look at http://cloudfoundry.com/micro and use the cloudcampgh code for instant access (till November 26 th ). Without the code invites might take a couple of days to activate. Combell Cloud Cases Company is sponsor, this is a short sales pitch Quite refreshing in its brevity "Devops in the Cloud" is a pleonasm http://www.flickr.com/photos/70260750@N08/637652...

What do these companies have in common? (bought by Nokia in 2006) (bought by Ebay) Well, they are all in Berlin! Berlin is one of the most vibrant places on earth where new web companies settle and thrive. Berlin attracts not only people from Germany but from all over the world. Especially English speakers are welcome in Berlin and find a lot of like-minded people here. Investors are flocking to Berlin and almost every day or week we seen new start ups. Even the big players are coming now, as the recent press reports (sorry, mostly in German): NEUES GOOGLE-INSTITUT: Investoren sehen Berlin als nächstes Silicon Valley (Berliner Morgenpost 2011-10-26) Amazon kommt mit AWS nach Berlin  (2011-11-10) STARTUP-METROPOLE UND SILICON VALLEY-PENDANT: Wann begann die Berlin-Euphorie?  (2011-11-10) BERLIN - Europas Silicon Valley (DRadio Wissen 2011-11-11) Berlin: ...

I migrated my domain to Google Apps and would like to share some of my experience. One of the great features is IMHO the Enterprise Marketplace where you can find lots of really useful (and even more of useless) Apps to add to your domain. Here is a selection of apps I tried or at least noticed. Must Have Doodle  integrates really nice into Google Apps and fulfils all dreams about scheduling meetings or asking several people about their opinion on something Useful Lucid Charts has a free account which is more than sufficiant for most simple drawing needs. The shape library is rather simple, e.g. no floor plan shapes. Diagrams are limited to 60 objects each. PresentOnlineNow gets the job done with regard to online presentations and comes for free for up to 10 participants in a meeting room. Only downside is that screen sharing does not work from Linux. Positive is that the participants don't need to install anything, it requires only Flash. Might Be Interesting ...

I would like to thank everybody who helped with the Birds of a Feather event yesterday. It was really great, at the start we had about 30 people and managed to fill up all the talk slots and also had a few discussions. Till the evening some more people arrived so that we where about 70 for the dinner. The party was also joined by participants of the CouchConf , which happened to be on the same day. I hope that everybody enjoyed it and will be back next year.

The  Velocity Europe 2011  is coming closer, only two weeks to go! If you have not yet signed up, do so now and use the discount code veu11pcy  to get 20%  discount off the regular price. The code can be entered on the Velocity registration page . We managed to put together a Birds of Feathers event just on the afternoon before the velocity. This will serve as a warm-up to the Velocity and provide the open space that the main Velocity does not have this time. Meet the vibrant Berlin web community at the Betahaus , a well-known location for start up companies. Attendance is free for Velocity attendees! As is the dinner & party after the event :-) Go to the  Velocity Eruope 2011 Birds of Feathers event page at veubof2011.eventbrite.co.uk  to see all the details and sign up, the event is limited to 150 participants.

Sukkot was really great this year. We had lots of guests, lots of food (no wonder when the holidays fall on Thursday and Friday) and, most of all, perfect weather. It was not too cold, mostly even above 10° C during the day and we could sit in the sukkah every day and evening! I don't remember such a good weather since we came to Germany, so this is really remarkable. Our small balcony sukkah Come and visit us next year!

I recently attended the first TechTalk of Telekom' DeveloperGarden in Berlin. It was about GPU computing, a topic that relates to GPU-based image scaling as Apache module . The speaker, Guido Juckeland , is a heavy user of GPU computing and works at The Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing at the Dresden Technical University . The talk was quite interesting for GPU computing newbies like me. It gave a solid overview and showed the different programming styles that can be used (CUDA and OpenCL). It conveyed a lot of best practice with regard to GPU computing and several important points to consider before starting. The most important aspect is to keep the PCIe bottle-neck in mind:  Moving data between the CPU and the GPU is very slow compared to moving it between the main memory and the CPU or the GPU and its memory. Therefore, in most cases it is not efficient to offload a computation to the GPU if the data is used only once. The speedup of the GPU-b...

The Velocity EU website is up and my talk is Be fast or stay behind – Building a Continuous Delivery Platform (together with Ingmar Krusch ). The conference is on November 8 th and 9 th in Berlin. BTW, this Berlin conference was first announced at the Velocity US in Santa Clara in an interview:   I hope to see you there, it will be a lot of fun! Make sure to order your ticket now while it only costs 849€ ( Best Price till September 28 th ) compared to the 1095€ ( full price )

At the Desktop Summit I stood almost 2 hours in the yard talking to Michael Bell and amongst many other things we got an idea about how to solve the problem of Desktop backups in large environments. The basic idea is to go away from a centralized approach and solve the problem with a peer-2-peer solution. The main benefit is scale-out vs. scale-up: As the amount of Desktops that require a backup grows, so does the amount of Desktops that provide backup space.

The Velocity Conference comes to Europe. But we don't want to have a clone of the US conference, we want to have a real European version of the conference. We need your help! The Call for Papers is open, please come and submit your paper to the Velocity Conference about: NoSQL Mobile performance Effective cloud computing JavaScript speedups TCP , HTTP, and SSL optimizations Metrics and monitoring Impact on the bottom line DevOps Web Operations Culture One of the benefits of submitting a proposal is solid chance at getting a free ticket to the conference! The conference will be on November 8th and 9th, 2011 in Berlin. Important dates are: Submission deadline for proposals is 9 August, 2011 Early Registration opens in September 2011 Standard Registration begins in October 2011

My colleagues at ImmobilienScout24 released the main part of our new deployment solution YADT - an Automated Deployment Tool . Check out the code at our Google code homepage . Documentation and proper packages will follow soon.

My notes on the second conference day at the Velocity Conference . The keynotes where again a highlight, to be topped only by the talk about Automating for Success: Production Begins in Development which happened to confirm all my theories about web operations and package-based deployment   :-) Videos are available on the Velocity 2011 Videos page , slides can be found on the Velocity 2011 Speakers Slides and Video page . Read also about the Workshops and the first day .

My notes on the first conference day at the Velocity Conference . The keynotes where really good, especially the first one about the right mentality for web operations and how to build a career in web operations. Videos are available on the Velocity 2011 Videos page , slides can be found on the Velocity 2011 Speakers Slides and Video page . Read also about the workshops and the second day .

My notes on the workshop day at the Velocity Conference. A lot of Chef stuff, but of course OpsCode was a sponsor. Real gems where Decisions in the Face of Uncertainity and Advanced post-mortem Fu and Human Error 101 . Read also about the first and second day.

Nadia, best of all wives in the world and my wife, gave a Challah baking  workshop at the Limmud Festival today: Putting it all into 1:15h was not so simple but Nadia managed and gave the participants a fast-paced and rich run-down of our Shabbat preparations. The participants where able to take not only their own self-made challah with them but also Nadia's famous bread-machine challah recipe and a handout about hafrashat challah (the separation of challah). Continue reading for the full recipe...

Am 26. und 27. Mai fand in Berlin die 5. Mailserver Konferenz bei Heinlein Support statt. Eine Konferenz von und für Spezialisten, war es für mich lohnen und hat mal wieder bestätigt, dass das gesamte Thema Email zwar nicht sehr kompliziert ist, in seiner Gesamtmasse and Details aber ziemlich komplex. Da in der iX mein Konferenzbericht erscheint, gibt es hier jetzt nur meinen Mitschrieb in Rohform.

Today I released the first part of our new Open Source Project YADT - an Augmented Deployment Tool . The configuration management with the help of RPM packages and a subversion repository is now available via the project repository . At the Subversion Day Berlin 2011 I gave a talk about how we do configuration management with RPM packages at ImmobilienScout24: Me showing the ImmobilienScout24 recruiting slide (Picture courtesy of H. Klotz) Download the slides as PDF for details: Subversion Day Berlin 2011 - Configuration Management with Subversion and RPM.pdf Read my conference reports: Subversion Day at Heise Developer SubGit at Heise Open

I just gave my talk at the LinuxTag 2011 about Self Service Virtualization as private Cloud and my new Open Source project Lab Manager Light . From the audience of about 80-100 people there where quite a few interesting questions and also several "I wish you had done that last year" comments. Download the slides: LinuxTag 2011 - Lab Manager Light - Self Service Virtualization as a Private Cloud.pdf

After I got very worked up again yesterday about people asking for "quick help" in setting up something and nobody thinking about the long term sustainability of IT operations I would like to point out a few facts about this topic: The major part of IT project costs are not related to the initial setup! Operations, maintenance, updates, bugfixes, application administration, backup and disaster recovery exercises make up the majority costs and should not be neglected in the initial planning. Actually, the more a project is meant to be temporary, the longer it will run and the more it will cost in the end. To underline my personal beliefs in this matter I found the following links on the Internet, I am sure that with some time on Google you can find even more: Distribution of Cost Over the Application Lifecycle - A Multi-Case Study This study show very nicely how up 60-90% of total project costs over 5 years are recurring costs ( Figure 3 ). Frequently Asked Questio...

On Tuesday, April 5th 2011, there was the first meeting of the devops Berlin XING group at ImmobilienScout24 where I also work. About 20 people showed up for an interesting mix of talks and open space. I got some very interesting and promising contacts and was happy to meet several people whom I had not seen for a long time. My own talk was about Package Deployment — Building Bridges between Dev and Ops and is available as a PDF download . The technology that we are building is available at the YADT project homepage and currently undergoing some rework before we can release it to the public.

Seems like a total waste of time without practical use? Well, it is — unless you need to test drive an idea that will be rolled out in your production data center running XEN PV but you have only VMware ESX as a playground. Since I spent a little time putting the pieces together I will share my experience based on CentOS 5.5 . Basically it all went es expected, I only had some trouble to get the XEN PV VMs into the regular network via bridging versus the NAT which is the default that comes with CentOS. Basic Setup: Configure your VMware VM to allow promiscuous networking: Allow promiscuous networking on the vSwitch Add this line of manual configuration to the Extended Configuration of the VM: ethernet0.noPromisc=“FALSE” Install regular CentOS and add the group "Virtualization": yum groupinstall Virtualization Make sure that there is enough free disk space in /var/lib/xen/images to store your virtual disk images. Network Setup:   Edit /etc/libvirt/qemu/networks/d...

Sitze gerade beim Ubuntu Berlin Stammtisch , und kann mal was dazu erzählen. Hier sind etwa 40 Leute, unklar wie viele zum Stammtisch kamen. Das ganze findet in der C-Base statt, aber das ist eine Thema für sich. Schade, dass da viel geraucht wird, damit ist die Veranstaltung wohl für Leute unter 18 tabu. Und es stinkt weil kaum Lüftung. Die erste Stunde war eher langweilig, es haben sich einige Grüppchen gebildet aber nix gemeinsames für alle. Scheinen aber alles echt nette Leute zu sein. Hab dann festgestellt, dass der Mensch neben mir quasi Konzernkollege ist und schon gab es ein spannendes Gespräch und einen interessanten Kontakt. Also alles in allem ein lohnender Abend und klare Empfehlung, mal wieder zu kommen. Hoffentlich ist der Laden dann auch rauchfrei.

I just got an idea that it might be interesting to combine mod_dims and GPU accelerated image manipulation libraries like NVidia's NPP . Apparently nobody looked into this so far, even though a google search will show a lot of GPU related image processing stuff , NVidia also provides a nice intro to GPU image processing . The idea is that if it would be possible to service scaled images as fast as unscaled images then it would be possible to skip all the solutions that deal with the caching of scaled images and just scale the images always on demand. This depends on the ability to service scaled images really fast, for example with the help of some Tesla boards for the image scalers. It would be an interesting comparison to compare the cost of sufficiently available storage for caching plus the cost for elastic on-demand scaling with the cost of permanent on-demand scaling with GPU acceleration. The advantage of the latter would be, if the costs are in the same region, that i...